The Justice Department released a report Sunday showing that two-thirds of state inmates imprisoned for rape had committed their crime against a child. Three out of four of the victims in the sexual assaults were girls, and 88 percent were known to the assaulter.

"This high rate of child victims is behind the heightened concern and the growing number of states passing laws that provide for notifying neighborhoods when sexual predators move in," said David Beatty, acting director of the National Victims Center. As part of the largest state prisoner survey ever undertaken, the findings were based on interviews with more than 14,000 convicts in 277 prisons in 45 states. The prisoners were serving time for violent crime in 1991. The study found that 13 percent of the total number of these prisoners had raped or sexually assaulted children.